Furnace - Is This a Hot Hot Box?

Boardgames Shut Up and Sit Down
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2021-11-17T18:59:23Z

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I feel as though a couple of years ago, this would have shot straight to the top of my wishlist/watchlist. I think the auction mechanism looks really fun.

But I’m less sold on the “the elbows of your opponents are your real obstacles” in a game that only has 4 rounds – so much potential for an early misstep to unbalance an otherwise tight cube-pusher.

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I can’t resist a good auction mechanic. I also love how easy this game is to teach.

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I see the playtime listed on BGG as 30-60 mins. For a 30 min game, I don’t think a misstep would be all that bad, just a part of the learning curve, and you could just have another go. At 60, maybe not so much.

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I don’t think this video was ad good as some of the recent ones. The sound was bad and the ideas seemed to be presented messily.

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I believe there was a problem with the microphone

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To me Matt comes over here as very hesitant and undirected, maybe distracted?

As for the game, it seems that “activate your cards in any order” versus “activate your cards in a set order” is a huge difference, and that’s the sort of decision that I expect the designers to have made by the time I buy the game, not an “oh, play it this way or that way they’re both fun”. That said, I’d be happy to try this, when I have little interest in any of the other games mentioned at the end. (My taste in general is rather lighter than Matt’s so that’s not surprising.)

I agree with Matt that the art is lovely – BGG shows six credited artists, but I wasn’t seeing any big clashes of style, so presumably there’s a really good art director somewhere in the production process too.

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I think they did decide. I feel like reading the rule book and watching people play the game a natural row is created and the logical game is to play in the set order. I think they must have come across a lot of frustration in testing and pivoted to the more freeform one as the default because having one wrong thing in the wrong place is worse and more damaging than the fussiness of creating a new order each turn.

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